Silly things do cease to be silly if they are done by sensible
people in an impudent way.

Jane Austen

How small, of all that human hearts endure,

That part which laws or kings can cause or cure.

Samuel Johnson

Art is either plagiarism or revolution.

Paul Gauguin

Don't worry about people stealing an idea. If it's original,
you will have to ram it down their throats.

Howard Aiken

Every truth goes through three stages: first it’s laughable;
then it’s attacked; finally it becomes obvious.

Arthur Schopenhauer

It is impossible to enjoy idling thoroughly unless one has
plenty of work to do.

Jerome K. Jerome

It was many years before I understood that I had surrendered
myself to the chief temptation of the artist, creation without toil.

William Butler Yeats, Autobiographies

If you know exactly what you're going to do, what's the
point in doing it?

Pablo Picasso

An old pro told me that originality does not consist of
saying what has never been said before; it consists of saying what you have to
say that you know to be the truth.

Harvey Penick, Harvey Penick’s
Little Red Book

The growing good of the world is partly dependent upon unhistoric acts, and that things are not so ill with you
and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived
faithfully a hidden life…

George Eliot, Middlemarch.

Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,

And waste its sweetness on the desert air.

Thomas Gray, “Elegy Written in a Country Church-Yard”

No one can rule guiltlessly.

Louis Saint-Just

There can be no power without mystery. There must always be
a “something” which others cannot altogether fathom, which puzzles them, stirs
them, and rivets their attention.... Nothing more enhances authority than
silence. It is the crowning virtue of the strong, the refuge of the weak, the
modesty of the proud, the pride of the humble, the prudence of the wise, and
the sense of fools.

Charles de Gaulle

Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing
because he could do only a little.

Edmund Burke

Do I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict
myself…

Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself”

I will study and prepare and perhaps my chance will come.

Abraham Lincoln

Out of the crooked timber of humanity, nothing straight was
ever made.

Immanuel Kant

Falling is neither dangerous nor dishonorable. But staying
down is both.